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The Yahoos call it the Tango Project, while Yahoo's users see it in the form of Suggestion Boards seen on a number of their services.

Getting your feedback and suggestions through to the people who can do something with them at a big site like Yahoo just doesn't happen as effectively as it does on smaller sites. That's something Yahoo hopes to change for itself.

Michael Olivier with the Yahoo Autos team discussed the challenge of handling that user feedback. Yahoo's solution involves a little technology and a lot of user interaction to get the most worthwhile feedback and stickiest complaints through to the people who need to see it:

We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues.

Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback. Though we aren’t always going to immediately act on it, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great suggestions with some Yahoo! schwag.

The Suggestion Board approach removes the burden of reviewing and assessing the large volume of feedback from Yahoo and puts it back on the users. Since they are the ones who will be using the product anyway, why not those users figure out what's needed the most?

Olivier noted that the Suggestion Boards are on Autos and fourteen other properties like the popular Answers and the just launched Pipes. "More boards should come online on Yahoo! properties in the future (Hotjobs, Groups, and Local/Maps are already waiting in the wings)," he wrote.

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